Friday, December 28, 2012

An Open Letter to Media-bashers

I have been a journalist nearly all my adult life: since 1978, when, having
just turned 24, I took my first job as a reporter at a small newspaper in
Massachusetts. So I am not new to criticism of the media. I have mostly
welcomed it, particularly the constructive criticisms, which motivate me and my
colleagues to strive to improve what we do. Critics help us be accountable.

But in recent years, a particularly strident
criticism of a so-called monolithic “mainstream media” has flourished on
certain blogs, talk shows and social media sites -- and even on the reader
comment sections of many of these same “mainstream media” outlets, including my own. People are
exercising their First Amendment rights, which is a good thing.

What is not a good thing is commentary that holds the “mainstream media” to be comprised of lying scoundrels pushing
a traitorous agenda, to put it bluntly. Not nearly as bluntly as some of the
rants I’ve witnessed, but, yes, bluntly.

My educated guess is that I have known many more
members of the media -- personally and professionally -- than any of these
critics, some of whom embrace the cowardly approach of anonymous commentary. I
have worked for almost 35 years with journalists, hundreds in total, and thus have been
intimately exposed to their methods, their personalities and their beliefs.
Some are now at large outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Some remain at regional or local companies. Many sit alongside me today at 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. A few have left
the profession.

I do not know of a single one who has lied in his
or her journalism or pushed an unsavory agenda. More on agenda in a moment.

Do we in the media make mistakes? Yes, just as mechanics, lawyers, clerks and pretty much everybody makes mistakes. People are
fallible.

Should we be called on these mistakes? Of course.
And we are, regularly.

Every newspaper with which I am familiar not only accepts
corrections but solicits them. My own, The Providence Journal, runs a notice every day on page
2 stating that we willingly correct all errors (and we do), with instructions
on how to report them; daily, we publish letters to the editor and allow
readers to post online. Still dissatisfied? You can submit an op-ed piece or
demand a meeting with an editor or reporter. Does your local bank or grocer go
this far to give you a say?

And when confronted with an error, every reporter
I have ever known not only has set the record straight, in print or on air --
in public, and, in the internet era, in perpetuity -- he or she has been embarrassed and troubled at the failure. Then learned from it and moved on, vowing to do
better. These are people of honor who would do this.

There is, of course, that handful of actual lying
journalists, although, to the best of my knowledge, I am not personally acquainted with any. Nearly all are eventually caught and exiled from the business by ––
well, by fellow journalists, the editors who employed them. The most recent
example is ex-Cape Cod Times reporter Karen Jeffrey, who was fired by the
newspaper late this year when an internal review confirmed that she had
fabricated characters and events in several of her stories. What I find most revealing about
this episode is that the editor and publisher of The Cape Cod Times not
only fired Jeffery, but published a front-page story explaining what had
happened and apologizing to their readers. (Disclosure: I worked at
The Cape Cod Times from 1979 - 1981, leaving before Jeffrey was hired.)

This shameful story of one lying reporter at one
small newspaper became national news. It did precisely because such instances
are so rare.

**********

Now, about this monolithic “mainstream media.”

There is no such thing. There never was. As long
as the First Amendment holds, there never will be.

True, there are outlets that generally favor certain
stories and political philosophies over others. Fox v. MSNBC is a well-known
example. But is this monolithic when America has thousands of publications and
broadcast outlets -- and now, in the Internet era, so many blogs and web sites
-- each with its own raison d'être, and each managed by different local owners,
parent companies, or regional and national chains?
Hardly. If you want monolithic “mainstream media,” look to North Korea, Iran or the old
Soviet Union, not here. Different blood runs through American veins, and has
since before our independence was declared.

The American press took root at a time, the late
1700s and early 1800s, when the primary goal of many editors and writers -- perhaps most -- was to advance
specific politics, not offer balance, opposing points of view, or even what we
now call news. Thomas Paine’s pamphlets and other publications relentlessly
pushed independence from England; in New York, the Gazeteer espoused
loyalty to the crown. The Founding Fathers adopted the Bill of Rights with the
realization that a free press meant that those who managed and owned the presses (they were literally that: printing presses) would
continue with their overtly partisan writing. And they did, as Hamiltonian
readers of Federalist publications and Jeffersonian readers of Republican
papers, two groups frequently at odds, could have attested.

The advent of the telegraph changed journalism, as did the establishment of the Associated
Press in 1846, both helping to create the concept of news as we more or less
understand it today -- and diluting, if not removing, the agenda-driven
philosophy of the late colonial and early republic periods. Later technologies
-- radio, TV and digital -- had their profound effects. So did the rising
wealth of the industrializing nation, which supported increased advertising
revenues, which in turn supported larger and more diverse staffs -- and many
more publications, stations, networks, wire services and more. Not exactly a
monolith, then or now. (For an exhaustive history of the American press, I
recommend Christopher B. Daly’s COVERING AMERICA: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism).

But, yes, some outlets today do have an agenda,
broadly speaking -- an echo, if you will, of the opinionated press that
Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington and Madison knew well. Fox offers a
conservative view, MSNBC a liberal one; The Wall Street Journal
generally speaks for the business community, The New York Times for the
intelligentsia, the New York Post for the working man. Is there anyone who
follows the news who doesn’t know this? But many more newspapers, magazines and
broadcast outlets fall into more neutral territory, with diverse and sometimes
conflicting points of view expressed throughout their content –– and pure dogma
relegated, for the most part, to columns and the editorial and op-ed sections,
clearly identified as such.

What media-bashers really mean by agenda is:
something they read or hear that challenges or refutes their own views. I suspect what they really would like is their own monolith, where opposition did not exist.

This holds true for people on both sides of the
political divide, but in my experience, it’s more commonly an assertion by some
on the far right. They see a broad conspiracy by large numbers of individual
journalists who, they believe, are determined to undermine the nation by
promulgating “socialist” policies. They assert that “mainstream media”
reporters, editors, publishers and broadcasters want to destroy marriage, swell
the welfare rolls, ruin health care, take all the guns away, flood the country
with illegal immigrants, over-regulate business, punish the rich, demonize the Republicans,
ridicule the conservatives, spread myths about the environment, remove God from
everywhere, and the list goes on.

And to that end, they believe that
“mainstream” journalists twist, distort and lie. What they really mean is that
only members of any medium who are lock-step with their own opinions are
truthful.

I have yet to hear a credible explanation of how
so many journalists, spread across this sprawling country of 315 million, could
conspire on such a scale. Perhaps by their oaths at the annual Skull and Bones
gathering? Seriously, if there is one thing I have learned about my colleagues,
it’s that virtually without exception, they are stubborn (and sometimes ornery)
individualists. If you have ever attended a meeting of a news staff, you know what
I mean. Individualism seems to be written into our genes.

Providence Journal newsroom meeting

**********
With
individualism comes conviction. And while there are certainly aimless
journalists, most of the many I’ve known hold strong beliefs about important things.
They did not get into journalism to achieve celebrity or become rich, Lord
knows.

These people I know believe in a well-informed citizenry. They
believe in righting wrongs, and in giving voice to the voiceless, and in
advancing social justice. They believe in exposing corruption, in explaining new or
difficult subjects, in writing what has sometimes
been called the first draft of history. They believe in the value of sports,
entertainment, the arts, fashion, and good health, fun and food. They believe in the power of
storytelling and a journalist's vital role in sustaining the public discourse, our
birthright as Americans. They believe in taking readers and viewers (and
themselves) to places they ordinarily don’t go. Some put their lives at risk:
war correspondents, notably, who believe that only independent reporting gets
to the truth.

These are the women and men of the mainstream
media I know. They are people of professional integrity engaged in commendable enterprise. In their chosen field, they are disciplined, hard-working, energetic, intellectually
curious, skeptical, sometimes cantankerous or tempestuous, and deeply committed
to a bedrock principle of our democracy: free speech.

3 comments:

I've seen excellent reporting of important local news first hand. This reporter's article, (Linda Borg, from the Providence Journal), is helping to right a long-term wrong at a public school. I am grateful to her and the Journal for taking on the story. The students, who have been harmed for 2-3 years, are too. What people may not realize is that we, the public, have to give a hand. Call and report things to the media so that they *can* report it to the public. Only then can we right those wrongs.Reporters, keep up the good work! There's a silent majority that still appreciates what you do everyday!

The idea that your corporate parent, Belo, is not a loudspeaker for the Texas GOP which maintain it tax rates beneficial to such a conglomeration is nonsense. Your paper maintains the Belo party line, as firmly enforced a Stalinism, allowing the cheapest of journalism to be printed off the AP wire. When Belo took over, it ruined what had been two magnificent papers that had been a part of the effort of create a record akin to that generated by the New York Times or Boston Globe. The proof is in the pudding. How much growth has the Providence Newspaper Guild seen in the last decade? How many up-and-coming writers from Providence have an honest shot of jumping into the big leagues of Fountain Street? Why did the Providence Phoenix print a cover story last month giving point-for-point tips to the BeloJo about content, internet possibilities, and revenue stream improvement? Why does ProJo.com still look like it has an infant for a webmaster? Why does our daily front page now feature more journalism from other papers in the Belo network, AP, and Reuters than it does actual local writers? And what about the blatant pro-corporate charter school model constantly being foisted on the public in an ongoing effort to trash state and local unions, men and women who make no offense other than actually needing to be paid for maintaining the ability of rich white male reporters to sit in comfort at their annual Newpaper Guild Follies dinners without duress. Are you serious?

I am reminded of the sort of double-think that the Communist Party used to pull when flipping between anti-Fascism during the Spanish Civil War and appeasement following the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact.